What is the significance of Karma Yoga?
Karma Yoga means doing something (good) without any selfish motive.
Karma yoga is a type of Yoga (duh) and one of the paths of spiritual practices as per Yoga philosophy. It is very well explained in the most famous Bhagwad Gita.
In my Yoga Teacher Training course, Karma yoga was part of the daily ten-hour yoga regime. Meaning, we were to do some sort of Karma yoga for one hour every day.
In a more literal sense, we could do anything like helping with gardening, cooking, cleaning, etc to fulfill that commitment.
For an initial couple of days, I looked at it as merely a task. I didn’t question it. I thought it is what it is; helping is always good! you know; Karma yoga.
Until one day, our Pranayama teacher shared with us a really beautiful perspective of this. Thank God for such people ❤
Anyhow, what he said was something that resonated with me. So I am sharing the same with a touch of my understanding.
In this modern life, most human unhappiness is caused by expectations. Expectations from relationships, jobs, strangers, products, life, you name it. And I bet, most of us are aware of this. There are many quotes/articles/books out there, trying to tell us to lower our expectations. And we definitely want to too!! We know that if lowered our expectations we would be much happier and satisfied.
But most of us keep failing at this attempt. It seems to be so naturally engraved in us. It seems that mere awareness is not helping us in conditioning our minds into having fewer expectations.
Karma yoga requires you to practice selfless work. Now, volunteering is one way to practice Karma yoga. But what happens when you do volunteering work over and over? What happens is that we learn to do things without having expectations; we are conditioning ourselves into having fewer expectations in general.
This way Karma Yoga can act as a practical tool to help us lower our expectations naturally in all parts of life ❤️
Maybe this is something we can all try to bring more happiness in our lives :)
